The Centaur Book

I wonder how many Herman Hesse readers realize how closely his stories of spiritual enlightenment parallel a tale of Lovecraftian horror:
"A sensitive man of spiritual temperament is wandering the world, unsure of his place in it. Eventually he encounters some strange experience that forever changes his perspective on the world, so that no matter how he tries, he cannot return to his old life. Instead, he becomes obsessed with this 'other world' of which he's caught a glimpse, abandoning his other life and alienating those around him. At last he finally reaches his goal, and passes from the world as his former friends remark what a pity it was that he wasted his potential in favor of his odd interests."
I've mentioned before in my reviews of Hesse's work that his picture of 'enlightenment' often seems to have symptoms identical to a progressing mental disorder, whether it's the paranoid schizophrenia of a homeless transient in A Journey to the East or the 'secular saint' who wanders about mumbling, smiling vacantly, and making incoherent remarks like any dementia patient in The Glass Bead Game .

These are precisely the same themes, and the same structure that Blackwood uses in his lengthy and ponderous exploration of 'spiritualism'. To anyone familiar with the European movement, where Eastern religions were taken up and retranslated in quite strange ways to make them fit Western philosophical structures, it will be fairly clear what Blackwood is getting at. Indeed, there is a philosophical German-ness to the whole affair that can become positively maddening.

Blackwood keeps returning to the same concepts over and over, trying to lay them out in far-flung, poetic language, reaching out to the reader's heart instead of the mind--which is why it took me months to finish this book. But Blackwood is well-known as a prominent author of tales of psychological terror, which gives his approach to the spiritual a lot more punch than that of Hesse, Jung, or Blavatsky.

Indeed, this tale has roughly the same structure as Blackwood's most famous work: The Willows , where the characters are trapped alongside a world they cannot comprehend, which threatens to take over their lives, and their very souls. Yet somehow, we are meant to believe that the same incomprehensible cosmic influence that we feared in The Willows, we are meant to admire in The Centaur.

Of course, there is a certain realism there: a great enlightenment, be it light or dark, should be frightening and unsettling. If it isn't, then it wasn't really enlightenment. Part of Hesse's problem is that his view of enlightenment is always so milquetoast that it can hardly seem profound or powerful. Of course such a total change in perspective would be alienating and disturbing, and Blackwood gets that aspect down to a T.

Likewise, the most fascinating aspect of the tale--and the part which kept me reading even when the prose was dragging on interminably--was his representation of a friendship between two sorts of man: the skeptic and the dreamer, which I have rarely seen framed with more sympathy and realism. What struck me most was the way both characters often seemed to be searching for precisely the same thing, but expressing it in such different words, and from such different points of view that they didn't realize that they were actually in perfect agreement, much of the time.

Unfortunately, this balanced portrayal broke down as we came to the conclusion, when it became clearer and clearer that we were supposed to side with the 'enlightened dreamer'--of course, I never did. Just as with Hesse's character, Tegularius, I found the curious skeptic much more interesting than the wild-eyed prophet.

Again, it came down to the fact that, in supernatural horror, the outside force is always dominating us--we cannot explain it, we cannot really understand it, but the merest glimpse of it makes us obsessed, makes us go mad. Often, it is a madness of misery and depression--in this case, it is a madness of self-assurance and hubris--but is that really better?

How do we separate the man who has glimpsed the beyond and gone insane from the man who has glimpsed the beyond and come away with Truth? It is a central question in this story, and the character's attempt to deliver his experience to others is doomed from the start, because a revelation cannot be transferred.

It is the question of every faith, of every self-serving philosophy: what makes it any better than what every other person is doing? What makes it fundamentally different from a delusion, or a disorder? If no difference can be shown, then no difference exists.

Though Blackwood delves deep into convoluted, grandiose phrases, he still isn't able to deliver to us the wonder his character feels. One does sometimes get that sense of the sublime produced by good art: where experiencing it is truly transformative, but Blackwood's repetitive labor never quite captures a fresh view of the world--it is mainly the same old spiritualism: nature is good, civilization is harmful, we must simplify and leave our bodies behind, embracing only the intangible. I tend to find that any 'answer' that seeks mainly to deny our humanity falls rather flat.

It just becomes another breed of nihilism: a statement that what we are is insignificant, that our wants and desires, our joys and pains, are to be ignored and fought against, and we should instead live for oblivion, or the dream of oblivion--or even stranger, a dream of this life, but set in oblivion.

Blackwood gives us another supernatural horror tale of the man who sees too much, and whose humanity is consumed by it. Yet this man wants to be consumed: he wants to be alienated, to be mad, to die, and wants others to join him. There is something much more terrifying in this portrayal than in all the sorry fellows who fight to the last before succumbing. Here is a fresh perspective, rarely explored: the cultist who throws himself into Cthulhu's jaws in a fit of ecstasy, his mind blasted beyond all reason, beyond anything but the overwhelming cosmic force that has seized him and made him inhuman--where the question of 'more than human, or less than?' seems to be little more than a quibble over semantics.